Over the past few weeks, Liftr Cloud Insights broadened the scope of the social media sentiment analysis behind our Sentiment scoring. This broadened social media analysis will cover additional CSPs that we are not yet tracking in-depth. Over the next few weeks you will see richer news and commentary driven by this expanding capability. For example, the Oracle Cloud news item below was flagged by our improved social media search capabilities.

Alibaba Cloud’s overall Liftr Cloud Index score (63.3, -1.6%) decreased based on a large drop in Sentiment (92.3, -12.6%). The Chinese New Year propped up Alibaba Cloud’s Sentiment score early in the week, but low social media traffic after the Chinese New Year contributed to lowering its score even more. Alibaba Cloud increased its Adaptability score (33.6, +1.1%), but it still remains last among the tracked CSPs—more than 90 points below Microsoft Azure. Alibaba has about 300 apps in its marketplace, while Google has about 630, AWS about 4,500, and Microsoft Azure has over 6,300 apps in its marketplace.

Amazon AWS remained remarkably flat across all attributes. AWS maintains its narrow lead on the overall Liftr Cloud Index.

Google Cloud’s Sentiment score (102.0, +13.8%) increased greatly amid its wins with the UK-based newspaper The Telegraph and with the Oakland, California-based Golden State Warriors basketball team. Very positive reaction also surrounded Google India’s Developer team announcement that it is sponsoring Cloud Study Jams, community-run study groups for developers.

Microsoft Azure’s overall index score (103.9, -0.2%) remained flat and is just 2.5 points below AWS. Microsoft Azure’s Reliability score (99.2, -1.0%) dropped another point last week due to lingering negative social media traffic related to its January 29, 2019 DNS outage.

News, Analysis, Commentary & Opinion

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

AWS was uncharacteristically quiet this week, with no announcements or major blog posts. AWS has been aggressively courting user experience (UX) designers over the past week for a wide range of applications but has otherwise been quiet.

Google Cloud

Google Cloud is introducing new certification and training to address the cloud skills crisis. The increase in cloud adoption has resulted in a corresponding increase in the need for workers skilled in cloud technologies, a workforce that is currently hard to come by. The company is adding four new certifications to their portfolio—Professional Cloud Developer, Professional Cloud Network Engineer, Professional Cloud Security Engineer, and G-Suite Certification—and localizing cloud learning and certification programs in Japanese, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese to increase accessibility. We see this certification and training initiative as an integral part of Google Cloud’s focus on Global 5,000 enterprise sales in 2019 (see Earnings section, below).

Google Cloud will be named the Official Public Cloud Provider of the Golden State Warriors and a Founding Partner of Chase Center. Under the agreement, the Warriors and Chase Center will collaborate with the Google Cloud team on a phased approach to create a seamless technology integration, as well as ongoing exploration of opportunities to leverage technology for the Warriors and Chase Center events and programming. The partnership will also focus on ways to use Google Cloud analytics and machine learning capabilities to enhance decision making and provide coaches, staff and players with more data-driven touchpoints and provide faster analysis of high volumes of data. Liftr Cloud Insights expects to see more of these high-profile sports alliances in the future.

Microsoft Azure

On February 4, Microsoft and Tom Tom announced they are expanding their partnership, “bringing TomTom’s maps and traffic data into a multitude of mapping scenarios across Microsoft’s cloud services,” including Microsoft Azure and Bing Maps. Tom Tom will host its services in Microsoft Azure, reducing latency to serve location-based data to other Azure cloud customers and tenants, including Microsoft’s own Bing, Cortana and Windows products. This is an important alliance for Microsoft as it seeks to hold its own against more popular mobile consumer driven mapping systems from Google and Apple.

Microsoft and Accenture also jointly announced, in conjunction with their joint venture Avanade, the launch of the Accenture Microsoft Business Group. The group will bring together over 45,000 Microsoft solutions experts to “emphasize helping clients migrate to Microsoft Azure and effectively harness the power of data and artificial intelligence, optimize Microsoft business processes with Microsoft Dynamics 365, and foster modern work and collaboration with Microsoft 365.” Microsoft is not sitting still on its enterprise sales, this new emphasis on Avanade will further strengthen its channel programs.

Microsoft Azure announced general availability of the Lsv2-series Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) on February 1. Lsv2 VMs run on the AMD EPYC 7551 processor. These AMD EPYC based VMs are available with up to 80 dual-threaded virtual CPUs. Each VM features 8 GB of memory and one 1.9TB NVMe M.2 SSD per 8 vCPUs (up to 19TB of fast solid-state storage per VM). These are not wimpy, low-cost alternatives to mainstream or entry-level VMs, they are high-performance VMs targeted at “high throughput and high IOPS workloads including big data applications, SQL and NoSQL databases, data warehousing, and large transactional databases.” CSPs are deploying AMD EPYC as a performance leader, and that is good news for AMD and not so good news for Intel.

Other Cloud News

Oracle Cloud Infrastructurecompares its AMD EPYC compute instances to AWS’s AMD EPYC compute instances. This is the first time we’re aware that two Top 10 CSPs are directly competing on non-Intel instances. This is good news not only for AMD but also for Arm and other architectures.

Two weeks ago, Rigetti started a public beta of its quantum computing cloud, which will compete with IBM Q cloud-based quantum computers as the only general-purpose quantum computers available for widespread use. Quantum computing is still in research and development (R&D) phase. Nonetheless it is being promoted before it is ready for market due to the death of Moore’s Law, the slowdown in performance improvements, and increases in manufacturing costs for today’s computing architectures.

Summary

The week’s Liftr Cloud Index was essentially flat, except for Alibaba Cloud and Google Cloud Sentiment scores and Alibaba Cloud’s ever-volatile Adaptability score. This may be due to post CES lack of announcements and the Chinese New Year; plus IBM Think is this week, and many cloud companies are saving announcements for closer to Mobile World Congress (MWC) at the end of February.

Earnings

Alphabet (Google Cloud) Alphabet, Google Cloud’s parent company, reported quarterly earnings this week. Alphabet did not break out Google Cloud’s revenue as a separate line item. However, during its earnings call, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stated that outgoing Google Cloud President Diane Greene and newly-appointed President Thomas Kurian (formerly with Oracle Cloud) worked together to craft a transition plan that emphasizes enterprise sales going forward. He further stated that Google Cloud will target Global 5,000 enterprise accounts in 2019, saying “we want to invest and scale our [Global 5000] go-to-market both in terms of direct sales and our channel partnerships.”Google Cloud is getting serious about enterprise customers. This could move them up in the Liftr Cloud Index closer to market leaders AWS and Microsoft Azure.We also observe that all of the top global CSPs stated during this quarter’s earnings reports that they will be spending to expand cloud infrastructure in 2019. That will increase each CSP’s capital expense (CAPEX) outlay, which will impact cost of goods sold (COGS) and reduce margins for deploying IaaS, PaaS and SaaS product lines. While investors view additional CAPEX negatively, CSPs must expand to meet growing demand. Less than 20% of enterprise applications have been migrated to public clouds. That means the potential exists for CSPs to add four times (4x) the data center capacity they already have in place. This is why Paul Teich, Liftr Cloud Insights Principal Analyst, will attend OCP Global Summit in March (see below).

Upcoming Earnings Reports

Baidu (Baidu Cloud) Tuesday February 12

Cisco Wednesday February 13

Liftr Cloud Insights will cover the important cloud-related aspects of each earnings release.

Events

Upcoming Events

IBM Think: San Francisco February 12-15, 2019 Liftr Cloud Insights Principal Analyst Paul Teich will be available for meetings this week at IBM Think. Paul will focus on IBM’s technology and messaging around cloud and multi-cloud, IBM closing its Red Hat acquisition, AI, data and analytics, as well as infrastructure and security.